by April Smith
“Go on and get dressed,” Doris ordered from on high. “Does Jo own any kind of pants?”
“Yes!” said Betsy, releasing her daughter into their new world with a decisive smile. “Yes, in fact, Jo prefers pants. You have to learn to ride a horse sometime,” she told the girl.
“I do?” Jo’s eyes were huge.
“Doris will take good care of you. What a marvelous adventure!”
Jo ran into the house.
“She’s a pistol,” Doris said admiringly. “How’re you getting on?”
“My head’s still spinning. I don’t know where to start.”
“You’ll get yourself going. Not a lot of choice in the matter.”
“When we get settled, we’d love to have you over for dinner,” Betsy said, wondering if people here had dinner parties, and how she could possibly pull one off with a wood-burning stove.
Doris stretched in the saddle, easing her hips.
“How did you and Calvin come to meet?” she asked.
“He got me out of jail!” Betsy answered brightly.
Doris laughed. “What’d you do, get a parking ticket?”
“I was a salesgirl at a department store. We went on strike and got arrested. He worked for the union. It was my first job.”
“Your first job, you had to go along,” Doris said sympathetically.
“No, the union was right. We deserved a lot better.”
Doris Roy didn’t answer. Her bright blue eyes scanned the distant horizon.
“I recall that years ago they tried to organize the meatpackers,” she mused slowly. “Out in Sioux City. Railroad, too. Unionizing. Doesn’t stick.”
The sun was only halfway to zenith and already puffs of heat were rising from the earth. Pete was dozing. Neither woman spoke.
Betsy found herself at a loss. “So how did you meet Dutch?”
“I met Dutch at a square dance,” Doris announced. “You don’t have those,” she added loftily.
Having dressed herself in her trusty red corduroys, Jo bounded from the cabin, climbed the porch rail, and mounted up in the saddle in front of Doris, leaning back against her cushiony chest.
“Bye, honey,” Betsy called. “Have fun!”
Jo wasn’t listening. It was the first time she had seen the world from between the ears of a horse, and she wasn’t looking back.
“I want to steer!” she demanded, and the two of them took off at a lope as smooth as a carousel. Betsy watched her daughter disappear in the arms of Doris Roy.
4
It was afternoon when the station wagon appeared on the road from the main house. Cal got out of the car carrying groceries. Betsy was sitting on the porch. She’d pinned her hair up but it still whipped across her eyes. Lance was propped against the steps, playing with rocks in his own small whirlpool of dirt.
“You look like real pioneers!” Cal shouted over the moaning wind.
Closer, he could see that Betsy was using a screwdriver to chip away at the clay that had hardened around their shoes.
“Got the car out,” Cal reported. “Imagine this: the garage owner, his name is Ken Addis, refused to let me pay.”
“Why not?”
“Scotty told him—and everybody else—that we served together, and Ken has a policy that he won’t take money from veterans. Isn’t that amazing?”
“In a million years that would never happen in New York.” Betsy stood to take the groceries. “And you found a store!” she said with mock ecstasy.
“It’s not the A&P,” he warned, kissing her.
She’d always liked the way he kissed. He had sweet lips, firm and tender, and did none of that tonguing stuff men think is the point. Lightly, he brushed the back of his hand against her breast.
Betsy smiled against his cheek. “Don’t do that…unless you mean it.”
“Who said I don’t mean it?” Cal looked around suggestively. “Where is Jo?”
“She’s with Doris. I thought they’d be back by now.”
“I’ll go get her,” Cal said, nuzzling his wife’s neck. “Later.”
Maybe it was a warning note in the wind or Betsy’s habit of being discreet in front of the children, but she pulled away, alert.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Betsy looked chagrined.
“I think I might have said the wrong thing to Doris.”
“What on earth did you say?”
“She asked how we met and I told her about the union.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know, she got all huffy. This ain’t exactly a union town,” Betsy said playfully. “I’m afraid she was offended.”
Cal took that into consideration.
“We have to be ourselves,” he decided. “That’s the whole point. They’ll get used to us, we’ll get used to them. It’ll all work out.”
He gave her a reassuring hug before getting back in the car. Betsy nodded and tried to shake it off, but knew she’d be nervous until everyone was back safe and sound in the cabin. In order to occupy her mind, she decided to give Lance a bath. He was too big for the sink, but she managed to sit him down on a towel placed over the edge and sponge-bathe his muscular little body clean of prairie grime, leaning him back in the crook of her elbow to carefully pour water from a measuring cup over his hair while he slipped all over the place, pleased with herself for not getting baby shampoo in his eyes, although she herself was soaking wet. Wrapped in the towel, rosy and warm, he smiled as she sang, “Lance, Lance, put on pants,” and got him into pajamas and gave him a bottle, her body relaxing along with his as she watched his eyes slowly soften into sleep.
She laid him in the crib and turned on the lamps, as it was already dark. She examined the cans of soup, Vienna sausage, and other items Cal had bought. He’d picked up a copy of the Rapid City Journal and, thank God, a package of beer. She cracked one open and took a long, cold swallow, glancing at the front page.
She was astonished to see that the headlines were all about Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack on Owen Lattimore, accusing Lattimore of being a top Russian spy. The newspaper’s editors gave a lot of space to McCarthy, rehashing his March 8 testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. You’d think they’d be more concerned about the price of corn than chasing phantom Reds, Betsy thought.
“Good Lord,” she mused aloud. “The press loves this lunatic.”
It went on to say their own senator from South Dakota, Karl E. Mundt, had introduced a bill “to crack down on Communist conspiracies that threatened to overthrow the government of the United States and set up a dictatorship.”
Why was she surprised that the spores of anti-Communist hysteria had taken root here, right under her feet? She was certain that she had not been wrong about Doris Roy’s allergic reaction to the mention of workers organizing. It was the same die-hard point of view as her father’s: belonging to a union was a step away from socialism, which meant it was a hair’s breadth from spying for Russia, which is why Betsy had never told her father that for a brief period of time, when she was a salesgirl at Gimbels department store, she’d been a member of the Communist Party.
Her stomach tightened and she felt very much alone in hundreds of miles of pitch-dark prairie, far from her youthful flirtation with the party, yet maybe not. Her own thoughts turned against her, and she began to defend herself from invisible accusations, which was ridiculous. She’d quit the party just after she met Cal. She’d grown out of those ideas by then. She scolded herself to stop. It was harmless nostalgia, another life, before marriage, before children, when she was a brave, romantic, trusting young girl on the other side of the country.
—
She saw herself walking down Thirty-Third Street on a steamy summer morning in 1941. She’d ridden the subway down from the Bronx, carefully dressed in a navy-blue rayon shirtwaist and pumps, blond curls tucked beneath a wide-brimmed hat, determined to play her part. She waited
on Broadway for the light to turn. Boys pushing garment racks raced by. Businessmen pressed around her, sweating through their shirts, hatless, suit jackets over their arms. On the other side of Herald Square the picketers were packed in tightly—fifteen hundred strong, the papers said. The swarm of placards proclaiming STRIKE! made the word jump out through the full-leaved trees.
At the store, Betsy Ferguson was another obedient clerk in a starched white blouse. She had always been tall for her age, with rangy arms that made her a high scorer in basketball, but in the store, like everybody else, she played it dumb as the mannequins in the window. For nine hours a day she kept up a courteous smile, then limped back to the subway crippled by foot cramps from standing all day without breaks. A six-day workweek paid $14.50. The girls were kept in line by a network of spies and store detectives and forced to ask permission to get a drink of water.
When Betsy first was hired, dark-haired, blue-eyed Elaine O’Grady, who worked in Fashonia Dresses on the fourth floor, had been the kindliest of the girls, explaining what was what. She warned Betsy about employees who were stools for management, squealing on whoever was in the union or a member of the Communist Party. Elaine was both. Later, when she was slipped a handbill about a meeting, Betsy understood that her new friend was risking her job.
Elaine O’Grady had come honestly to her beliefs. Her mother and baby brother died in the influenza epidemic of 1917 when she was two years old. Her father placed her in a Catholic home for children in Queens and disappeared forever. She lived there until she was released at age sixteen.
“I took my little bag and walked a couple of miles to a boardinghouse,” she’d told Betsy on a lunch break in the park. “It was the worst year of the Great Depression, but I didn’t know a lot about it because we were well fed and insulated by the nuns. I didn’t realize how terrible it was until I saw things for myself—desperate people looking for jobs, doctors driving taxicabs, people who’d lost all their money jumping off buildings. I thought, What kind of bleak, horrible world have I been sent into?
“I met a fellow at the boardinghouse who was a member of the Young Communist League. I’d never heard much about Communism, but I would listen to anyone who could explain the reasons for the awful situation I was in. What he said made sense. YCL became my family.”
Betsy was so inspired by Elaine’s courageous story of facing the world alone that she joined not only the union but the Young Communist League as well, which turned out to be one party after another—beach parties, boat parties—it even had a girls’ all-city basketball team!—a marvelous social club made up of smart young activists full of juice, looking for answers, as eager as Betsy was to create a world without the ups and downs of boom or bust, uncertainties, poverty, and war. It fit with Betsy’s idea of herself: that she was always ready to lend a hand, and here were people united by causes larger than themselves, while others—like the bosses at Gimbels—cared only about the dollar. The union asked, “Which side are you on?” and Betsy knew.
She crossed the street to the park across from the strikers. It was breathlessly hot, even in the shade of the maple trees. On benches set against banks of rhododendrons, an array of New Yorkers sat stupefied, dreading each degree of rising temperature. There was birdsong. The baking sidewalk tiles released the stench of pigeon rot and the ground-in residue of a million, million footsteps. In another hour the humidity would be in full bloom—the kind of humidity that made you grateful for the dirty warm drafts of the subway.
Yet the men on strike wore suits and neckties and the women proper summer dresses with heels. It was important to convey that retail workers were protesting peacefully and were not a bunch of roughhouse troublemakers. Just now Betsy could hear through the traffic the high voices of female picketers singing, “I am a union woman / Just as brave as I can be / I do not like the bosses / And the bosses don’t like me…” But their innocent gaiety was held back by rows of coppers on steadfast brown horses and police vans.
Betsy joined Elaine and the picketers as they continued their slow waltz around the block. Selling expensive clothes to rich women did not fit Elaine’s socialist ideals, but it paid for her split of a one-bedroom apartment shared with three other gals, and supported her real life, which was writing a novel. It was to be a raw exposé of the life of a working girl inside a big department store, she explained. She was incessantly writing in a spiral-bound book, even as they marched, and almost bumped into a lamppost when the column of protestors in front of them stopped short.
There was some kind of ruckus going on at the main entrance. Strikers were yelling at Gimbels customers trying to enter the store not to cross the picket line. Long-simmering resentment between low-paid shopgirls and uptown ladies broke into open war. There were screams and threats. Someone threw a bottle of red ink at a gray-haired shopper, ruining her white linen suit.
“This is disgraceful!” she cried. “I’m going to call the mayor!”
A whistle blew.
Shouts of “Here they come!”
Mounted police plunged into the crowd, swinging nightsticks. Armored motorcycles appeared, roaring around the block. Police trucks equipped with tear gas blocked off the streets. People ran. Uniforms and detectives bored through the crowd, clubbing anyone in their way with blackjacks and fists, pushing people off their feet. It seemed hundreds of sirens were screaming at once. Strikers grappled with hired thugs. The orderly demonstration became a fighting mob of bloodied heads and faces.
Betsy and Elaine tried to duck into a doorway, but they were pulled apart. Big hands clamped around Betsy’s arms. Up close, the cops looked larger than life. Their taut faces and heavy pistols made her legs tremble in surrender.
Elaine shouted, “Stay strong! A union lawyer will get you out! Remember why we’re doing this!”
She was dragged in one direction and Betsy the other, marched to the curb and forced into a police wagon with other striking workers. Inside it was dark and smelled like a sewer. There was a metal grate down the middle, one side for men, one for women. It already held several common criminals a lot worse off than the strikers were. Betsy could make out a young black girl wearing a summer halter dress that showed scrawny shoulder bones. Her mouth was cut. She pressed a cloth against her lips but it was already soaked with blood that pooled freely on the floor. Another woman had a blanket over her head. Beneath it was a feral, dirt-stained face. She was carrying on an argument with Jesus in a guttural voice that wasn’t human. Staring emptily through the grate was a middle-aged white man wearing a threadbare suit, tie, and brown cap, unshaven, with haunted rheumy eyes.
“Where are they taking us?” Betsy wondered out loud.
“Downtown,” answered a union member on the other side of the divider, a gray-haired older fellow wearing a loud red sport jacket and crumpled porkpie hat. “First time, sweetheart?” he whispered hoarsely.
Betsy nodded, staring wide-eyed. He’d been smashed across the nose and his entire face was swollen purple.
“Don’t name names. Never give ’em a straight answer,” he mumbled, swaying listlessly with the movement of the wagon.
“I swear I won’t,” she promised.
The injured girl moaned a high-pitched, keening cry. The despondent man had a racking cough. The rest of the strikers huddled in silence, forsaking their defiant songs. The siren went on and the van picked up speed, going south until they reached the Women’s House of Detention, a severe monolith that rose like a fortress on Tenth Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The men would go on to the Federal Detention Center on West Street, and after that, she could not imagine.
Betsy climbed out with her female comrades to an alley filled with the familiar New York City smell of wet asphalt and rotting garbage. Clothing ripped, bodies bruised, shoes and purses somehow gone, they tried to muster dignity as they were led to a steel-plated door. Inside they were escorted down a grimy passage that wound around to the booking desk, where the benches were full of despairing women wa
iting to be processed, among them the black girl from the van, slumped against the wall. Her slack arms showed bluish needle marks.
They made Betsy stand beside a giant yardstick to have her mug shots taken, side and front. Then a matron called her name and marched her down a corridor that reeked of industrial paint and soured milk. She was burly as a wrestler, with an iron grip on Betsy’s upper arm as she steered her into the lockup—rows of cells where inmates, dressed in stiff white prison-issue frocks, were listlessly sprawled on their bunks under the weighty blanket of stultifying heat. All at once they stirred, and then every prisoner was on her feet at the bars, calling “New bitch!” and worse, a clanging roar of obscenities that accompanied Betsy on the long walk to the holding area.
The matron turned the key in a huge lock that opened an empty cell. There was a toilet with no stall. Betsy decided she’d rather die than use it.
“Now what?” she asked.
“You’re here until they decide what to do with you.”
The matron’s footsteps echoed briefly on the steel floor, quickly overcome by the screeching taunts of the inmates. Betsy sat on a concrete bench and tried not to stick her fingers in her ears. She stared at the bricks in the wall, four times the size of subway tiles, as if to emphasize that everything here was bigger than you. Mortified by defeat, she wondered desperately what had happened to Elaine and the others, if union headquarters even knew that she was here, when a lawyer would show up, and what her father would say when she was finally allowed to make that phone call.
The thought made her stomach go sour. Her father, Albert Ferguson, was an angry man. He’d owned a shipping company that went under during the Depression. A few years later her mother, Rosslyn, died of bone cancer within weeks of being diagnosed. His wife’s death broke his will. An alcoholic spiral drove him to his knees and he never got up, but he held on to his hatreds, especially of unions. Betsy had had to lie to get out of the house for meetings. He’d disown her completely if he knew she’d also joined the Young Communist League.
